The fate of Easter Island offers a warning for humanity for the disaster caused by non -durable use of resources.
The accepted theory is that the arrival of the first Polynesians on the small island in the 1200S led to rapid deforestation to build the Moai Stone images. The famous engravings are solid, up to 40 feet long and 75 tons of weight.
The rapid change in the environment led to a collapse of the population before the arrival of Europeans in the 1700s. According to scientists, the images of Easter Island are a warning against over -exploitation of the natural world.
But archaeologists recently challenged this theory of social collapse on Easter Island. Instead, researchers looked at factors such as drought that may have led to catastrophic shifts in the culture culture of Rapa Nui.
William d’Andea of Columbia University in New York and colleagues analyzed hydrogenisotopes in the waxy coating of old leaves preserved in sediments with the lake of the island of the island occupation history.
The amount of such isotopes in the leaf washing correlated with changes in local precipitation, giving the researchers an aid to estimate changes in the rainfall on the island.
The data showed that the island had considerable drought between 1550 and the early 1700s, with the rainfall dropping no less than 900 millimeters per year in that period. For example, the drought between 2010 and 2017 on Rapa Nui seriously reduced freshwater stocks, with an annual rainfall with 370 millimeters.
The authors of the new study are of the opinion that the drought coincided with major changes in Rapa Nui Society, possibly cause a decrease in stone statue structure.
“Our hypothesis does not require a violent war or demographic collapse in 1600 CE, but gives a reasonable explanation for possible causes of intermunicipal conflict,” the authors of the study write.
“Dry happen on Rapa Nui, and they can really be dramatic,” says Geologist Daniel Mann of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who was not involved in the study.
But not all archaeologists agree that drought was the main cause of conflicts or cultural decline.
The fall in rainfall could have had a negative effect, says Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at Binghamton University in New York. But there is no proof of nutrition stress in the skeletons of people from the period, nor any sign that work stopped at the quarries used to build the images.
The Silent Giants of the Easter Island post: New instructions for a lost civilization first appeared on Anomalien.com.
